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The Bywell Arts Festival starts with a preview this evening then opens tomorrow until Sunday 4.30 at Bywell on Tyne, Northumberland. Entrance free.
My husband submitted four new dot paintings, here are two of them. One above and one below.
There are two churches next to each other in Bywell. During the art festival both are hung with original paintings.
I'll be selling my stencilled bags at the back of St Peter's Church.
Helen
I bought a plain cork pinboard from IKEA and painted the central area and the wood frame with duck egg blue emulsion paint.
The panel was bordered in low tack tape. The tape and cork board were painted.
Tape is removed at the end of the project to reveal a contrast coloured border.
The stencil is SIB14-S Dogs stencil from The Stencil Library. A slightly smaller version of this stencil is one of 15, laminated, card stock stencils bound into the book Stencil It by Helen Morris.
I stencilled the dog pattern onto the pin board with raw umber acrylic paint. I used a size 4 stencil brush and the 'dry paint' method of stenciling. Take a small amount of paint onto the tips of the brush. Work paint well into paper towel. Use a vigorous circling motion to work paint into the brush then a gentler circling to remove excess paint. The paint needs to be moist not wet before applying through the stencil. Use a stippling motion (light dabbing) or a circling motion to apply paint. Read method here or watch it here
There are diamond shaped registration holes cut into each corner of the dog stencil. This is to help acheive an accurate pattern repeat.
Stick a piece of low tack tape firmly onto the board underneath the registration holes then mark the tape. Re postion stencil by matching up registration holes with marks on the tape.
I embellished the pin board by placing the pins at the mouths of the stenciled dogs. Costume jewelry hangs from the pins. Individual keys displayed on the pin board might look good too.
Helen.
This is a simple demonstration showing how to mitre a stencilled border. It is adapted from my book The Stencilled Home.
A mitred corner gives a neat solution to joining horizontal and vertical stencilled pattern in a right angle. To help acheive the correct angle for a mitre fold a piece of paper to an angle of 45 degrees or buy a wipe clean Mighty Mitre Tool from The Stencil Library.
Helpful Hint; Tape the tool into the approximate corner position as a reminder that you will need it before reaching each of the corners.
How to miter a stenciled border. For the purpose of this explanation I shall describe the project as a panel but it could be any right angled surface such as walls, table top, a door, a tablecoth a floor or a ceiling. I have used BB75 Laurel border stencil from our Budget Collection.
As you approach the corner place the tool over the stencil, align the short edge of the tool with the edge of the panel. Make sure that the diagonal edge of the mitre tool runs through the corner of the panel. Stencil the border towards... and onto the mitre tool. Remove stencil and tool. A neat diagonal finish should be revealed. Position the stencil to start stencilling the border in a new direction. The next bit is really easy..
Simply place the mitre tool along the diagonal edge that has just been created. This protects the previously stencilled area. Align the stencil matching the diagonal and the straight edges. Continue the stencilled border in the new direction. Remove tool, a neat mitred corner should be revealed. Here are a few examples.
The final photo shows inner and outer borders that have been mitred. The middle border has a butt join.
I'll save the explanation of that one for a future post. Both my books can be ordered from The Stencil Library, from Amazon and from other retailers worldwide.
Helen
The Olympic Torch just passed through our village.
I stencilled a bag to commemorate the day.
The paint had no time to set so I had to the hope that the rain did not damage it. Red, white and blue was worn, flags were shown, whistles were blown, the police outriders waved and touched hands with the crowds. There were high fives, waves and smiles. The mood was jolly, the weather was not. Our sentiment was warm but everything else was damp and chilly
Stocksfield high fives pic from Northumberland.gov.uk.
The stencilled butterflies that stood so proud at the Jubilee celebration attempted a soggy, patriotic welcome as George Nicholson from Durham ran through the lower part of the village of Stocksfield ferrying the torch on it's journey to the Olympic Stadium in London.
He and three other runners that carried the torch through Stocksfield is one of the special 8000 torch bearers chosen from all regions of the UK and for the few minutes that he approached and passed the rain ceased and the sun was kind to him. Many people admired by stencilled bag and asked where to buy them. I had missed a sales opportunity and should have had a barrow of them!
I had made two more for the window of the local cafe so sent people there. If there were no bags to buy at least they would get hot coffee and cakes.
When I volunteered to wrap Bywell Hall for the jubilee weekend I had little idea how to acheive it.
I 'tweeted' for help but no one had a clue. The original inspiration was a photo in my Tim Walker Photographs book where a country house appeared to be wrapped in ribbon and tied with a large bow. My Friend Gill and neighbouring artists Linda and Paco suggested we wrap the hall with version of the union flag. This is how we did it.
Firstly we ordered several rolls of poly-cotton sheeting from Factory Fabrics and set them onto the lawn at Bywell Hall. Strong ropes were laid out to the exact measurements of the hall then we positioned the fabric between them. We used the full width of the white sheet for the saltire then overlaid it with half a width of red. For the diagonal threads of the flag we used half widths of white with quarter widths of navy blue on top. We cut the fabric to size then handed it to Ros and Anne who worked in my dining room pinning and sewing it for us. Lynda made channels to thread the ropes through. The ropes were attached securely to the front of the hall by metal eye hooks drilled into the stone work of the building. There were two horizontal and two verticals on each wing of the hall.
Fortunately I have a large dining table.
Gorden and Steve fed the rope through the sheets and we hoisted and tweaked them into position. They were secured with ties. The rain poured relentlessly. The men wore shorts and were soaked and frozen. I had not received 'long ladder training' so had to stay on the ground...Hurrah! Eventually the rain beat us but we returned the following day to finish. Gordon gathered the diagonals into a tiny bow of navy blue chiffon which wafted prettily in the breeze.
Ropes hold the fabric in place.
It was still in place the following day and the sun almost made an appearance.
Helen.
I just knew that if I dusted off the stencilled hammock and put it in the orchard we would be in for a month of cold weekends....and we were.
The stencils are JA47 and JA138 both are cherry blossom designs from our Japanese Style stencil collection at The Stencil Library
I noticed a little handwritten note on the hammock that told me that student Lauren and I stencilled it in 2002....
I think that might have been the last time that the sun shone!
Helen.
I seemed to have been surrounded by stencilled moths and butterflies for the past couple of weeks.
Friends and I made 80 of them to decorate the Jubilee Big Lunch at Bywell Hall. However, our offering was hugely out numbered by the efforts of the village school children and youth groups.
Photo above Susi Bellamy
Photo Susi Bellamy. From reception school to cubs and Brownies glitter and paint reigned supreme as paper templates were glued, tissued and decoupaged into a flight of exotic creatures to grace the lawns at Bywell.
It was lovely to see the children look for their artworks on the day. The idea was to sign your creation and retrieve it once the Big Lunch was over.
London company PSG Group gave us drafting film for The Butterfly Tree.
Stocksfield company Cherry Moon greetings cards donated card stock to us for the children's butterfies. All was gratefully received and put to good use.
The jubilee decorations were our communities biggest and most fun project for a long while, the painted butterflies was just one part of it. The templates were made by enlarging a few of the shapes from the new repeating stencil featured here. We used both the surround and the bit cut out from it to draw around onto the card. White Cherry Moon card butterflies fluttered under the canopy of a huge copper beech tree.
The red white and blue butterflies were stencilled and cut from a custom sized CO13 Butterfly Stencil. They will be reused when the Olympic torch route runs through Stocksfield this weekend.
The butterfly queen flags were stencilled onto chiffon. I photographed the process to share with you ....once you have had a break from butterflies for a while!
Have you been involved in a community decorative project...Jubilee, Olympics or making the local surroundings more fab?
Here are two luxurious examples of pattern stencilled onto velvet.
In both pictures just four colours have been used to maximum effect.
Stencils used in the second picture are OTT38 in the centre, the two borders are OTT5 and OTT7
and the colours: Hookers Green, Alizarine Crimson, and Metallic Bronze and True Met Gold
The top picture shows Phthalocyanine Blue instead of the Alizarine Crimson. The stencils are OTT36 in the centre and OTT7 and IN10 are the border stencils
Both panels are samples from classes taught at The Stencil Library. Both panels measure aprox 48 inches by 48 (122cms) Big enough for a floor cushion, a throw or small table cover. They were stencilled onto upholstery velvet from Factory Fabrics but look equally fabulous when stencilled onto painted surfaces such as walls and furniture.
Helen.
Large, stenciled butterflies hung from the lower branches of a specimen oak in the grounds of Bywell Hall, Northumberland.
The tree was planted by a British princess, there are a few royal trees in the collection. The wingspan of the stencilled butterflies measured around 28 inches. I used matt emulsion paint from Crown Paint to stencil onto heavy drafting film from PSG in London. The film was slightly damaged which made it unfit for sale but was perfect for our use. When I was watching the master decorative painters at Salon in Paris a few years ago they told me that drafting film was a wonderful surface on which to demonstrate decorative techniques such marbling and wood graining. I took their advice, it is also beautiful to stencil and gild onto.
The stencil was a custom sized CO13 Butterfly from The Stencil Library. The design has three overlays and the cut out bit from the first layer of the stencil provided the template to make all the butterfly shapes from. The shape is quite simple and once drawn onto the film it can be cut with scissors or scalpel. Fortunately, I have a cutting machine so most of mine were cut for me. A group of friends came to help stencil them, drink Prosecco and provide laughter.
A mixture of first time stencillers and bubbly provided surprisingly good results and no butterflies were harmed in the process.
On the night before the Jubilee Big Lunch my ever patient friend Jeanne helped me arrange and secure the butterflies in the branches. We were unable to use step ladders (insurance fears) so we lobbed a ball of red blue and white twine through the branches taking great care not to damage anything. The lichen held the string in place allowing the butterflies to flutter above the heads of the picnickers.
It was dark when we finished which explains the wierd glow in some of the pictures. Since the picnic I have had requests from two families wanting to hire the butterflies as wedding decoration. They will make an appearance in my garden and might be seen lining the route of the Olympic Torch when it goes through our village. Using the same template we made thirty stencilled, red, white and blue butterflies onto white card, I'll show you what we did with those on a future post. This was not the only tree that we dressed with butterflies, a vast, copper beech tree was visited by strings of white butterflies and moths, I have nearly finished editing the pictures, please visit again to see them.
Helen.
The decorations created for The Big Lunch at Bywell Hall were simple, plentiful and made by the community.
The picnic was a celebration for The Queen's Diamond Jubilee. One of the re-occuring decorative motifs was the profile of Queen Elizabeth at the start of her reign.
The Stencil Library cut the large ones from heavy drafting film donated by PSG polyester converters of London and the small ones from heavy paper donated by Cherry Moon Cards of Stocksfield.
The visitors arrived and set out their picnic furniture to have lunch with the queen.
Later today I'll show you the butterfly trees that we created around the lawns at Bywell.
Helen.
